Three Can Keep a Secret

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Leo Gunther gingerly closed the squeaky door of his beloved and battered Ford Mustang and glanced up at the low-hanging sky. He was a butcher by trade, a collector of vintage cars from the ’60s, who still lived with his mother on the family homestead. But while also the second son of a lifelong Vermont farmer, now long passed on, he wasn’t any more connected to the soil or dependent upon the weather than the average bank teller. Even as a kid, he’d mostly only accompanied his taciturn father back and forth along the dry dirt runnels of the family’s cornfields. But traditions remained, and his weather eye was always on the lookout, as were so many others, across this mountainous, rural, ancient New England state.

Especially today.

Leo crossed the parking lot, pulled open the door to Mitchell’s Dry Goods, and exchanged the charged, gunmetal outdoors for the dimly lighted embrace of a cluttered, tight-fitting country store, jammed with cans and boxes lining bowed wooden shelves, and crowded with square-built men holding Styrofoam cups in blunt-fingered hands. Mitchell’s was where local loggers, farmers, heavy equipment operators, and the town road crew met every dawn to authoritatively trade information about everything, anything, and everyone within their combined realm of knowledge.

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